PeterH:
jimbarstow:
I'm think of doing a project handling large data sets which would tax a single arduino. For that, I'll build a distributed network of arduino's that communicate with XBees.That doesn't seem like a very practical way to handle large data sets - it would be a very expensive and complicated approach and I wouldn't expect it to be at all cost effective. Microcontrollers are simply not designed to be efficient data processing platforms. If you want to handle large data sets, you would be better off doing that on a different platform.
I should have qualified "large". It isn't large in volume but in the variety and location of the data. We have 200 acres and I'm trying to gather data from well pump, water usage, solar heating, solar electric, irrigation, etc and integrate it all into one dashboard. This entails having sensors spread out across the property. The distributed nodes will gather the data and do a small amount of processing on the sensors it controls then forward it on to a central controlling node which will do the integration. I can't imagine trying to do all this data gathering with one arduino.
I would never use the arduino for manipulating large numbers of records but for handling data gathering from a large number of distributed sensors, it's perfect.